Linktree is the cheaper pick while you sell little, because its free plan costs nothing and takes 12% of a sale. Stan Store is cheaper once you sell often, at a flat $29 a month with no cut. Linktree’s paid plans still take 9%, except $34.99 Premium.
The Linktree vs Stan Store crossover sits at roughly $242 a month in sales, where 12% of your revenue passes Stan’s $29. Below it Linktree Free wins, above it Stan does, and Linktree Premium at $34.99 loses to Stan at every volume including zero. Neither lets you use your own domain. Both sets of figures come from the companies’ own help centres.
Search this question and Google hands you 7 pages. 5 of them belong to companies selling a rival to one of the 2, and the top-ranking article among them is Stan Store’s own blog.
That does not make them wrong. It does mean the numbers get quoted loosely. Ecomm.design runs a table saying Linktree cannot sell digital products and cannot host courses, both of which Linktree documents on its own site.
So I read both companies’ own pricing pages and help centres instead. Below are the 5 jobs a bio-link store has to do, who wins each, and the 2 costs the comparisons skip.
Key Takeaways
- Linktree keeps 12% of a sale on its free plan, 9% on Starter and Pro. Only the $34.99 Premium plan reaches 0%.
- Stan Store keeps 0% on both plans and has no free tier. That is $29 a month before your first sale, or $99 with the selling tools.
- Stan Creator beats Linktree Free above roughly $242 a month in sales, and beats Linktree Premium at every volume, including zero.
- Linktree’s pricing page answers the fee question with a 25 cent payout charge. Its own help centre documents the 12%.
- Neither platform lets you use a custom domain, and both normally open a Stripe account for you rather than using the one you have.
- Selling is country-gated on both. Linktree lists 35 countries, Stan lists 37, and Stan falls back to PayPal outside them.
Job 1: being the link people actually tap
Linktree wins this outright. It is the only thing Linktree was built to do, and the free plan gives you unlimited links, a themed page at linktr.ee/yourname, and a name Linktree says 70 million people trust.
Stan Store gives you a creator storefront that holds link buttons too. Stan is built to sell, and the buttons come along.
Platform fees are rarely the biggest leak in a small store, and they are the easiest thing to obsess over. Pricing too low, a checkout that loses people at the last step and a product nobody was asking for all cost more, and the Online Selling Mistakes Challenge covers them over 5 days by email, at no cost.
Familiarity does real work when you are asking someone to tap a link in a bio. A creator on r/socialmedia asked for alternatives after a price rise, from $125 to $200 a year, and the money was not what was stopping her. She wrote that she was wondering whether “people see Linktree as a trusted link and they might be less likely to click on another link in bio tool.” A 60% rise, and the sticking point was still the domain.
Linktree leans on exactly that. Its own FAQ calls the linktr.ee domain “safe, recognizable, and built for social, giving your audience confidence to click.”
Taking the vendor’s advert off your own page
Both companies put their own branding on the page you send followers to, and both charge you to remove it. The prices are not close.
On Linktree, “Remove Linktree branding” arrives with the Pro plan at $14.99 a month. On Stan Store, the “Try 14 Days Free” referral banner sits at the bottom of your store on the $29 Creator plan, and Stan’s help centre is plain about the fix: to remove the Stan branding from the bottom of your store, you need to be on the Creator Pro plan. That is $99 a month.
So on Stan’s entry plan, the page where people buy from you carries an advert for Stan.
The address is rented either way
Neither platform will let you point a custom domain at your store. Linktree’s help centre says it does not offer the option to use a custom domain to replace the linktr.ee URL, and adds that it does not provide developer tools for domain forwarding either. Stan’s help centre says your store URL will always remain stan.store/yourusername, and that you will not be able to update it to anything else.
I have been on the wrong side of that before. Years back I tried to build an audience on Twitter and failed at it, badly enough that I gave up and started over on LinkedIn from about 500 dormant followers. 6 weeks of daily posting and commenting later I was at 1,000.
None of the first effort came with me. An address you do not own works fine right up until it stops.
That is the same reason a lot of sellers end up running a link page for traffic and a separate checkout they control. Our breakdown of an online store for digital products prices the 3 ways to do that second half on a single $10 sale.
Job 2: charging for something without sending people off the page
Both take the payment on the page, so a follower never leaves. What each keeps for that is where they split.
Stan Store keeps 0% on both plans. Its homepage says “0% Transaction Fees, Always,” and that part is accurate. What you pay is the subscription: $29 a month for Creator or $99 for Creator Pro, dropping to $300 and $948 if you pay a year upfront.
Linktree runs the opposite model. The page is free and the sale is not. Linktree’s help centre publishes the ladder in US dollars: the free plan keeps 12% of each sale, Starter keeps 9%, Pro keeps 9%, and only Premium keeps nothing. Stripe’s standard US rate of 2.9% plus $0.30 sits on top of all 4, and climbs another 1.5% on an international card.
Read that ladder twice. The plan Linktree’s own pricing page marks “Recommended” is Pro, and Pro is still a 9% plan.
Linktree publishes a worked example on a $34.99 course, and it is worth walking through because it is their arithmetic, not mine.
On the free plan Linktree takes $4.20, Stripe takes $1.31, and you keep $29.48. On Starter or Pro, Linktree takes $3.15 and you keep $30.53. On Premium, Linktree takes nothing and you keep $33.68. Sell the same course through Stan Store and you keep $33.68 too, because Stan takes nothing and Stripe still takes its $1.31.
The number Linktree’s own pricing page gives you instead
Linktree’s pricing page carries an FAQ, and one of the questions on it is “Does Linktree charge transaction fees?” The answer opens “Yes, and we’re proud of how competitive they are,” then says: “we currently only charge USD$0.25 per payout and constantly looking for ways to pass on more profit to our creators.” It closes with “While many platforms take a significant cut, we’re committed to market-leading transparency and flexibility.”
That 25 cents is real. It applies to Linktree Shops, the affiliate-commission side of the product, and it says nothing about what happens when you sell your own ebook. The 12% that covers that sits on a different Linktree page.
Both pages are Linktree’s. One is the page a buyer reads before signing up.
What each one costs at your sales volume
At $1,000 a month in sales, Linktree’s free plan costs $120 and its $14.99 Pro plan costs $104.99, while Stan Store’s Creator plan costs $29 whatever you sell. Every figure below is monthly billing, and Stripe’s 2.9% plus $0.30 is left out because it is identical on every row.
| Monthly sales | Linktree Free | Linktree Starter | Linktree Pro | Linktree Premium | Stan Creator |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| $0 | $0 | $7.99 | $14.99 | $34.99 | $29 |
| $250 | $30 | $30.49 | $37.49 | $34.99 | $29 |
| $500 | $60 | $52.99 | $59.99 | $34.99 | $29 |
| $1,000 | $120 | $97.99 | $104.99 | $34.99 | $29 |
| $2,000 | $240 | $187.99 | $194.99 | $34.99 | $29 |
3 things fall out of that table that no comparison I read stated.
Stan’s $29 overtakes Linktree Free at about $242 a month in sales. That crossover is the whole decision for most people, and it arrives sooner than it feels like it should. 5 sales of a $47 product leave you just under it. The 6th puts you over.
Linktree Pro costs more than Linktree Free until you are doing roughly $500 a month in sales. Paying $14.99 to cut the fee from 12% to 9% only pays for itself once 3% of your sales is worth more than $14.99.
And Linktree Premium is more expensive than Stan Creator on every row, including the $0 one. If you were going to pay Linktree to escape the fee, Stan costs $5.99 less a month and gives you courses, a community and bookings for it.
Job 3: handing over the file, the course or the call
Stan Store wins this by a distance, and the reason is what sits on its cheap plan.
The $29 Creator plan includes an unlimited course builder with course analytics, community features, a booking calendar, recurring subscriptions, lead magnets and digital downloads. Courses and a community at $29 a month is genuinely unusual. Kajabi’s entry plan is $89 a month and Podia’s is $49, and Podia takes 5% of each sale on top at that tier. Our Stan Store pricing breakdown has Stan’s full plan-by-plan cost.
Linktree does sell digital products and it does host courses, whatever page 1 says. What almost nobody mentions is who builds them. Linktree’s own help centre puts it in the first sentence: “With Linktree’s Digital Products and Courses (powered by Kajabi), you can sell downloadable content.” You can price anything from $1 to $10,000, the buyer pays through Stripe, and the download is instant.
This is where the ranking pages come apart. Ecomm.design’s table marks Linktree “No” on digital product sales, “No” on course hosting, “No” on instant delivery, and lists its payment gateway as “PayPal/Square”. Linktree runs on Stripe.
The same table then puts Stan’s course hosting on the $99 plan, and Stan’s own help centre lists an unlimited course builder on the $29 one. A reader trusting that page would pay $70 a month more for something they already had.
Bookings are the real gap. Linktree has none, so a coach selling calls stacks Calendly on top. Stan puts a calendar on the cheap plan.
Job 4: selling to the same buyer twice
Both platforms collect an email address. Only one of them lets you make more from the buyer while they are still at the checkout, and it charges $99 a month for the privilege.
Linktree collects email and SMS details on your page, and connects to a mailing list on the Pro plan. That is the whole story. There are no order bumps, no post-purchase upsells and no funnels, so a Linktree sale is worth what the buyer clicked on and nothing more.
Stan has all of it, and none of it is on the $29 plan. Discount codes, limited-quantity offers, order bumps, upsells, funnels covering up to 20 products, affiliate management, email broadcasts and flows, pixel tracking: every one of those is a Creator Pro feature. Moving up costs $70 more a month, or $648 more a year on annual billing.
Whether that is worth it is arithmetic rather than a feature list. Priced yearly, Creator Pro has to add $648 of sales before it breaks even.
If bumps and upsells lift your revenue by 10%, that means $6,480 a year in sales. Below that you are renting tools that cost more than they return.
Pricing the product properly moves that line faster than any upgrade does, which our guide on how to price digital products walks through.
Job 5: getting the money out, which is the job nobody compares
Every guide on page 1 compares the fee. Not one of them checks what happens to the money after the sale, and this is where both platforms do something most sellers would want to know about.
Neither platform lets you use the Stripe account you already have. Linktree’s help centre: “When you connect Stripe to Linktree, we create a new Stripe account for your Linktree store.” Stan’s help centre is blunter, saying you will be prompted to set up a Stripe Custom account managed by Stan, and that you will not be able to connect an existing Stripe account.
Stan does run a narrow experiment on this. Connecting an existing Stripe account is open to a slice of new creators who signed up after May 2025 and go through onboarding on a mobile browser. Stan warns that if you use it, the income tab inside Stan may not show accurate earnings.
Payout speed runs the opposite way to the fee. Linktree says funds are available in Stripe immediately after a purchase, and land in your bank on whatever Stripe schedule you set, daily, weekly or monthly. Stan holds a sale in an “Available Soon” balance while Stripe settles it, which Stan puts at 2 to 7 business days, then you click Cash Out manually with a $10 minimum, then wait another 24 to 48 hours. The realistic wait is 3 to 9 days.
So the platform charging 12% on its free plan pays you faster than the one charging nothing.
And you may not be allowed to sell at all. Linktree lists 35 countries where paid digital products work. Stan lists 37 for its Stripe Custom accounts, and unlike Linktree it has a fallback: sellers outside the list are pointed at PayPal instead, which Stan’s help centre says covers more than 200 countries.
You can check your own against PayPal’s country list. Both platform lists are broadly the United States, Canada, the EU and EEA, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong and the UAE. Most of Asia, Africa and Latin America is on neither.
And leaving is not clean on the Stan side. Stan’s help centre warns that deleting a recurring membership, community or course product does not cancel your customers’ memberships. You have to cancel each one by hand, or they keep getting charged for something you have taken down.
From December 2025, Linktree moved US and Canadian plans to tax-exclusive pricing. A $14.99 plan is now $14.99 plus your state’s sales tax.
This is the job where a plain checkout tool beats both. CartMango, which I run, and Payhip both connect to the Stripe or PayPal account you already have, and the sale lands in it. CartMango’s own wording is “Funds go directly to your Stripe/PayPal accounts instantly. We’re not interested in holding your money.” Gumroad does not work that way, and holds your money on its own payout schedule.
None of them gives you a link-in-bio page. Swapping to one is trading a job away, not a free upgrade.
Linktree vs Stan Store, job by job
Stan Store is the only one here that does all 5 jobs, and it puts order bumps and upsells behind the $99 plan. Linktree does the bio link best and takes 12% of a free-plan sale to do the selling. CartMango has no bio link at all.
| Job | Linktree | Stan Store | CartMango |
|---|---|---|---|
| The link in your bio | Yes, unlimited links on the free plan | Yes, a store page with link buttons | No. CartMango Mini Pages hosts a sales page rather than a link list |
| Charging for a sale | Yes. 12% free, 9% Starter and Pro, 0% Premium | Yes. 0% on both plans | Yes. 0% on every plan |
| Files, courses, bookings | Files and courses, powered by Kajabi. No bookings | Files, courses, community, bookings, memberships | Files with protected delivery. Courses and community not yet, planned for October 2026 |
| Selling to the same buyer again | Email and SMS capture, list integrations on Pro | Order bumps, upsells and email, all on the $99 plan | Order bumps on every plan, upsells and downsells from $20 a year |
| Getting paid out | A Stripe account Linktree opens, 35 countries | A Stripe Custom account Stan manages, 37 countries, PayPal elsewhere | Your own Stripe or PayPal, paid out instantly |
CartMango is my own platform, so treat that last column as an interested party: it is free until October 2026 and starts at $10 a year after that, with course hosting and community arriving on the $30 a year plan in October 2026.
Who should pick which
Pick Linktree if the bio link is the product. You are sending traffic to other places, you sell rarely or not at all, and the free plan genuinely costs you nothing. The 12% only bites when you sell.
Pick Stan Store if you sell most months. Past roughly $242 a month, the flat $29 is cheaper, and you also get courses, a community and bookings on that same plan. The tools that raise your average order are a separate $70 a month, so budget for Creator Pro or plan without them.
Pick neither, and pair them, if you want to keep the checkout. A free Linktree for the links plus your own checkout keeps the traffic hub you already have and puts the money in your own Stripe account. It is 2 tools instead of 1, which is a real cost in setup time. Our Stan Store alternatives roundup sorts the checkout options by what you actually need.
FAQ
How much does Linktree cost per month?
Linktree’s paid plans run $7.99 for Starter, $14.99 for Pro and $34.99 for Premium a month, with a free plan underneath. Linktree prices its own website in the visitor’s local currency and does not publish a single global price list, so those figures come from its subscription listings on the US App Store. Talkspresso and Linkero, 2 of the pages ranking for this comparison, quote the same $8, $15 and $35.
What are the disadvantages of Linktree?
The 12% commerce fee on free-plan sales is the big one, and the 9% on Starter and Pro surprises people who assumed paying removed it. Beyond price: no custom domain, no booking calendar, no order bumps or upsells, a Stripe account Linktree opens rather than yours, and paid digital products limited to 35 countries.
What is better than Stan Store?
It depends which job you are replacing. For a pure link hub, Linktree’s free plan is cheaper and better known. For a deeper course and community setup, an all-in-one such as Podia at $49 a month or Kajabi at $89 is the honest comparison, though both cost more than Stan’s $29. For the checkout on its own, Payhip starts free and takes 5% a sale, and CartMango is free until October 2026 then $10 a year with no cut. Both pay into your own Stripe or PayPal.
What is better than Linktree?
For selling, almost anything with a real checkout, because 12% of every sale is a high price for a link list. Stan Store is the usual answer and the one page 1 pushes hardest. Beacons is the other link-in-bio people name. If the links are all you need, Linktree Free is hard to beat.
Does Stan Store have a free plan?
No. Stan’s help centre says so, and adds that the free-looking accounts people spot are affiliate-only, without store features. New accounts get a 14-day trial.
Can I use my own domain with either?
No, on both. Linktree keeps you on linktr.ee/yourname and says it does not provide domain forwarding tools either. Stan keeps you on stan.store/yourusername permanently, and its help centre says there is no built-in way to embed your Stan store in your own site.
When the bio link is not the part you are paying for
Work back through the 5 jobs and the Linktree vs Stan Store choice gets smaller than it looked. Linktree charges you for the sale. Stan charges you for the month. Both hold the Stripe account, both own the address, and both decide which countries are allowed to sell at all.
If the bio link is the thing you actually need, keep it. Linktree Free does that job for nothing and does it well. The part worth pricing on its own is the checkout sitting behind it, because that is where the 12% or the $29 is going.
If your Linktree vs Stan Store answer is to split the 2 jobs, the checkout half is the cheap half. CartMango is free until October 2026 and $10 a year after that, takes no cut of a sale on any plan, and pays into the Stripe or PayPal account you already have.
About the Author
👋 I’m Welly, founder of CartMango (the site you’re on), a checkout platform for digital product sellers. We’ve previously processed $179M+. I also run BirdSend (email marketing tool, 3.1B+ emails sent). On the side I show other non-techie digital sellers how I use AI workflows to automate 50%+ of my operations. Find me on LinkedIn.
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